Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize
Dear Members of Stockholm's County Administrative Board:
The signers of this petition include an array of peace groups and peace activists based in the United States. The undersigned wish to endorse and support the investigation that Stockholm’s County Administrative Board has reportedly begun based on it supervisory role over the Nobel Foundation and information received from Norwegian peace researcher/author Fredrik Heffermehl. We understand your Board has formally asked the Nobel Foundation to respond to allegations that the peace prize no longer reflects Nobel's will that the purpose of the prize was to diminish the role of military power in international relations. According to Heffermehl, “Nobel called it a prize for the champions of peace,…and it's indisputable that (Nobel) had in mind the peace movement, the movement which is actively pursuing a new global order … where nations safely can drop national armaments.”
The undersigned non-profit peace organizations and activists base their endorsement of your inquiry on the following facts:
What's the Matter With Norway?
The beautiful thing about the internet is that whenever you write an essay on a topic you imagine is new, some wonderful person contacts you within about an hour who's written a whole book about it. This is different from writing a book about something new (or old) like the Kellogg-Briand Pact (everybody still thinks it must be a breakfast cereal).
Fredrik Heffermehl's book “The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted,” is a wonderful thing to discover. I understand if you just can't stomach discovering that Norway and the committee that hands out the peace prizes have become as corrupted as a Congressman. But if awardees like George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Barack Obama already had you scratching your head a little bit, you may appreciate learning the details of where the prize bestowers ran off the rails and how they might manage to climb back aboard the peace train.
Alfred Nobel left behind a legally binding will that required giving a prize to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Like the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Nobel Committee has largely abandoned its original mission.
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Heffermehl argues persuasively that no Nobel prize for peace has been awarded with appropriate justification since 2001. In fact, in his analysis, 50 of the 120 prizes given between 1901 and 2009 were not justified. Heffermehl bases that judgment primarily on the case made for each laureate by the committee awarding the prize. Were he to examine the laureates and those passed over, the number of unjustified prizes might increase.
Heffermehl also looks at the justification for the prizes awarded under each of the 12 committee chairs and six committee secretaries that have ever held those posts. The two chairs who have served since 2003 receive far and away the worst scores, while the two who served up through 1941 score dramatically better than the others. Similarly, the two secretaries who held that position up through 1945 receive high marks, while the one, Geir Lundestad, who has been Secretary since 1990 has, in Heffermehl's scoring, performed miserably.
